Over the past few years, there has been an explosive increase in the use of the Internet for communication, data transfer, research and recreation. As usage increases, the types of user activities become more varied. Businesses, educational institutions, individuals, and governments are beginning to use the Internet for everything from personal communication to mission-critical commercial negotiations and transactions. Indeed, electronic mail (e-mail) is developing into a preferred alternative to the telephone, conventional paper mail service and facsimile transmission as a means to communicate.
One of the conveniences that electronic mail provides is the ability to distribute an electronic message to a group of recipients simply by adding destination addresses. It is not necessary for a user to print out and mail copies of the same letter to multiple parties, or to transmit the same letter by facsimile to multiple parties. Further, a user can define distribution groups of multiple recipients and simply enter the group name to send an electronic message to all group members. The savings in time, resources, and money makes this an efficient and effective way to transmit messages to multiple recipients.
As more and more users join the electronic messaging community, difficulties arise in the transfer of messages within and among the various e-mail protocols. There are several e-mail protocols in operation today, including SNADS, SNAPI, PROFS, X.400, and SMTP, all of which operate in different ways. In order to communicate between systems that operate on different protocols, messages must be converted form one protocol to another. During this conversion, the originator and recipient information may be mutated or lost. Converted messages may never reach their intended recipients. Moreover, when messages cross protocols, message tracking and status monitoring becomes even more difficult as information originally included with the message may no longer exist.
Accurate electronic mail status reporting may be a critical feature for e-mail subscribers. This feedback may be provided in the form of a return status message, which will normally be generated in two situations. In the first situation, called positive status, a message indicating a successful delivery is sent to the orginator upon delivery to or receipt by the intended recipient. This is typically only done at the request of the originator. It is analogous to requesting a return receipt from the post office for conventional mail delivery. The second situation, called negative status, occurs when a message is not successfully delivered to one or more intended recipients for a myriad of reasons. The originator is typically provided with the original message and a reason why the message was not successfully delivered. Negative status is typically automatic regardless of whether the originator has requested feedback.
Problems in providing feedback to the originator across different e-mail systems occurs due to the potential mutation and/or truncation of originator and recipient information, typically by external gateways. In most situations the originator information is not affected, resulting in a return status being delivered to the originator with no clear indication of whom the intended recipient for the message was.
Existing systems have other shortcomings. For example, many message storage facilities maintain the message data in shared memory. The use of shared memory inherently creates capacity problems. Such systems are also inefficient because they often store and manage redundant information. Moreover, due to the ability of a plurality of sharing processes to access the information, the integrity of the shared data is at risk.
Depending on the particular hardware architecture, the amount of shared memory is typically limited to a theoretical maximum of 2048 megabytes. With the observed growth in e-mail traffic, this would provide a maximum capacity of approximately 5,000 to 20,000 documents, depending on document sizes.
Many electronic messaging systems today use fourth generation databases to store distributions. This is inherently too slow and inefficient for the demands of high volume messaging switches.
Another shortcoming of using shared memory for the storage of e-mail is the relatively high expense and low capacity of RAM memory versus that of disk storage.
Another shortcoming of using shared memory is that unless expensive battery-backed-up static RAM is used, the data will be lost in the event of a power failure. Hard disk technology does not have this limitation, as information stored on hard disk is no longer volatile.
To meet the demands of modem electronic messaging, there is a need for a system and method that efficiently stores, tracks, manages, monitors, and transfers e-mail across a plurality of protocols.